Silicone hydrogels are polymers that contain both hydrophilic and hydrophobic monomers. When these polymers are used to produce contact lenses, these lenses have high oxygen permeability, good wettability, and good comfort.
Contact lenses produced from silicone hydrogels are typically made by the following procedure. A mixture of hydrophilic and hydrophobic monomers, as well as other components is placed in a lens mold and cured with light. After curing, the lenses, which remain attached to either the front curve or the back curve of the mold, are removed by releasing with a suitable solvent. Typically isopropanol, water or combinations thereof are used. After release, the lenses are extracted with alcohols and/or other organic solvents to remove unreacted hydrophobic monomers. Typically these lenses are extracted with hexane, methylene chloride, isopropanol, or ethanol. For water immiscible solvents, those solvents are removed by evaporation/drying prior to equilibration into aqueous solutions. For water miscible solvents, the lenses are equilibrated into aqueous solutions. Equilibration into aqueous solution will remove any remaining solvent, unreacted hydrophillic monomers, and hydrate the lenses. However, there are problems with this procedure.
First, when the lenses are released using alcohol or alcohol/water mixtures, the lenses swell to a level where a fragile lens, that damages easily, is produced. Second, hydrophobic monomers have limited solubility in mixtures of alcohol and water, as well as some organic solvents. Therefore to extract those monomers lenses must be extracted with large volumes of these solvents and often the solvents must be heated. This presents problems when preparing lenses on a production scale due to the environmental concerns of disposing of large quantities of used solvents. In addition, due to the low flash points of the solvents which are currently used, heating those solvents presents additional hazards. Finally, the final hydration/equilibrium steps require the use of 100% aqueous solvents, such as deionized water, buffer solutions, saline solutions, or other packing solutions. When lenses that have been extracted with alcohols and/or many organic solvents are directly transferred to 100% aqueous solutions, there is an additional risk of damaging the lens due to the variability of swell of the polymer as well as the fragility of the resulting polymer.
Therefore, there remains an unmet need for a method of processing cured polymers that addresses one or more of the problems described above. The invention described herein meets that need.